Throughout its history, the American university has learned to accommodate divergent functions—theological, humanistic, vocational, and scholarly, for example—that have been organized into curricula, and legitimized on the basis of changing ideas about the uses of knowledge. The growth of theatre studies has been complex and multifaceted but, in the end, its generalizable characteristics can be understood to fall into two prevailing curricular orientations. The first, an aesthetically-oriented curriculum, teaches the values of the liberal humanist approach. The second, a market-oriented curriculum, is characterized by professionalism and vocationalism. These formulations mark the triumph of “Enlightened” objectivity that has afflicted our practices with discordant beliefs about whether to teach humanistic content or the crafts of theatrical production. In the 1930s, this debate came to be identified as a dichotomy between “craft” or “culture.” 1 The field has never resolved this clash and is still mired in disagreements about whether to emphasize intellectual growth or technical skills, or whether and how to do both. Currently, liberal arts education embraces a market-oriented, utilitarian aim as students’ intentions for the bachelor of arts (B.A.) degree have changed from developing a philosophy of life to that of preparing for economic security. 2 This trend is especially troubling for theatre studies because it raises questions about the ethics of professional training for a labor market with so few careers. All too often now an entrenched dichotomy frustrates efforts to teach a theoretically coherent curriculum. Both foundations of the theatre curriculum—the liberal arts and the pre-professional—have been exhausted. Programs are notoriously disjointed and dysfunctional, quagmires of turf battles, ideological discrepancies, and fiscal scarcity. So in its 200 year struggle for recognition worthy of its potential in liberal arts education, theatre’s disciplinary potency and integration with larger university concerns remain illusive. The field often suffers, in sum, from a crisis of legitimacy. But educational dispensations are neither monolithic nor neutral, not intransigent but malleable.
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